A galaxy from 11 billion years ago just reappeared in a shocking way-不由自主网

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A galaxy from 11 billion years ago just reappeared in a shocking way

时间：2025-06-14 11:35:14 来源：不由自主网

When NASA's Hubble Space Telescopesnapped a picture of an elliptical galaxy,关键字3 it caught something else in the frame: A bright, red arc of light wrapped around it.

That glowing curve isn't the sign of a broken telescope, but in fact another galaxy — about 19.5 billion light-yearsfrom Earth in space. It's much farther than the elliptical galaxy, seen as the central dot in the image at the top of this story, roughly 2.7 billion light-years away.

The strange, bent shape of the extremely remote galaxy, called HerS 020941.1+001557, is caused by a quirk of nature called "gravitational lensing," something predicted in Albert Einstein's General Theory of Relativity over a century ago. But the gravitational lensing here displays a special type of phenomenon, known as an Einstein ring.

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The Hubble Space Telescope reveals a strange natural phenomenon among a galaxy trio image. Credit: NASA

Gravitational lensinghappens when a celestial object has such a massive gravitational pull that it warps the time and space around it. NASA often uses the analogy of a bowling ball placed on a foam mattress or trampoline to illustrate how the fabric of spacetime bends. Light that would otherwise travel straight curves and gets distorted as it passes through the warped spacetime.

In this scene, the nearer galaxy SDSS J020941.27+001558.4, is acting like a colossal magnifying glass in the sky. This allows scientists to see the even more distant galaxy, making it appear brighter.

But gravitational lenses are known to play tricks on the eyes: They have the power to even replicate objects, the way a funhouse mirror can create multiple irregular images.

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Astronomers are now adept at spotting the telltale effects of gravitational lensing, but that wasn't always the case. Four decades ago, the concentric arcs of light and stretched celestial objects could be downright confusing.

In 1987, an enormous blue arc, thought to be hundreds of trillions of miles long, was first considered one of the largest objects ever detected in space. The arc was discovered near the galaxy cluster Abell 370, with another similar object near galaxy cluster 2242-02.

Later that year, scientists at Stanford University and the National Optical Astronomy Observatory in Arizona sorted out that they were, in fact, optical illusions, distorted by Abell 370. The New York Times published a story about the "bizarre" implicationof Einstein's theory, titled "Vast Cosmic Object Downgraded to a Mirage."